JMassaclmselts Horticultural Society. 193 



correctness of his position. Mr. Knight was indeed eminently 

 successful in his experiments. Some of the best fruits of our 

 catalogues were the result of this process. Nevertheless it is a 

 delicate process, subject to tedious anxiety and long patience, in 

 expectation of something exceedingly good among considerable 

 that may be poor and mean. Seedling fruits, as was well known 

 before the results and methods of Van Mons's theory were ascer- 

 tained, were long coming to perfection, or even into bearing. It 

 were necessary to wait many years, in the ordinary method, for 

 each new production to acquire sufficient sti'ength to make blos- 

 som buds, and bear the long w^ished for fruit. The data which 

 the Belgian horticulturist has given, by which to judge from the 

 leaves and stems respecting the quality of the fruit, were not be- 

 fore known with any degree of certainty. Left to the ordinary 

 course of things, the pear, procured by cross impregnation, must 

 require nearly twenty years to have a fair trial, and the apple and 

 plum their proportionate time; or aided by all the then known 

 effects of early grafting on stocks of a smaller and slower growth, 

 and other expedients, still the chance of a good and standard fruit 

 among a host of inferior ones was very uncertain. This has been 

 very lately exemplified in the floricultural line. From thirty 

 thousand seedling dahlias at WidnalPs, (a celebrated dahlia grower 

 in England,) six only were deemed worthy of further care; and 

 every mere tyro in floriculture well knows that from his impreg- 

 nated plants the chance of success is only proportional to the 

 number of seedlings. We are told that the superb /Rhododendron 

 alta clerense was one of eighteen hundred seedlings from im- 

 pregnated parentage. With these, and a thousand other instances 

 of the uncertainty of impregnated seedlings answering the expec- 

 tations of the fruit and flower grower, it was very properly ob- 

 served, that " the method was complicated and somewhat un- 

 certain." That this was Mr. Weston's opinion of the relative 

 advantages of the system of Knight and of Van Mons we have 

 no doubt; and with our knowledge of the latter's success from 

 his own peculiar method, we must also coincide with this senti- 

 ment. To the florist, cross impregnation Avill always be valu- 

 able, as affording him an almost illimitable field in the production 

 of those vegetable monsters, his peculiar delight and pride — 

 curious, wonderful and admirable, as works of art and modifica- 

 tions of nature, but wholly thrown out of the sympatiiy of the 

 botanist, except as instances of the mysteries of vegetable phy- 

 siology in its strange metamorphoses under constrained and artifi- 

 cial circumstances. To the kitchen gardener, and even to the 

 agriculturist, it is a subject of importance in the possible produc- 

 tion of some new and valuable variety of grain, root, or the like, 

 from old and long known races. By this mode, after a series of 

 experiments, undoubtedly many of the more tender plants of 

 VOL. III. NO. V. 25 



